“Human beings are helplessly fake”: Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, author of JCB Prize-shortlisted Chronicle of an Hour and a Half

The debutant author talks about his fascination with human nature and his solitary writerly life

If he became a published author, Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari was sure of one thing: that his mother’s name should appear on the spine of his book. The 39-year-old has dedicated his debut novel, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half (Context) — shortlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature 2024 — to V.P. Nusaiba, his mother.

Set in a fictional village in the foothills of the Western Ghats, Chronicle... is narrated by multiple voices, taking readers into the minds of its various characters. It is visual, poetic, and has among its driving forces, a mother who lives the hard life.

While it is winning accolades, Kannanari, who lives in a small Kerala town called Areekode, a two-hour drive from Udhagamandalam, is unaffected. He has moved on to other works, and is currently writing his third novel, a political satire based in Kerala. His second book, The Menon Investigation, is set to be released next year.

Kannanari perfectly fits the description of the ‘solitary writer’. He lives with his mother, who used to be an Anganwadi teacher, and he writes for up to 10 hours a day. “When you are writing, it is expected that you spend a lot of time thinking; and when you are thinking, it simply means you are silent and looking at the screen,” he says. 

Writing is like meditation in front of a blank screen, says Kannanari. “It’s okay for me even if I spend three or four months staring at a blank screen.” He previously wrote three novels, which did not get published, and has finally found his footing in the literary world with Chronicle... “After the third one, I was very frustrated; not intellectually or creatively, but because I had abandoned my Ph.D in JNU where I’d also done my M.A., to dedicate myself to writing fiction,” he says. But he knew that rejections were “a part of the necessary experience” to become a published author.

He wrote Chronicle... in eight months, five years ago, but its publication got delayed with the pandemic. Kannanari has been writing for 15 years; he started with poetry, penning long, meta-physical poems for seven to eight years, before venturing into novels. The author says that he has “immense faith in the art of the novel”. He considers novels a “modern form of heresy”, where instead of god, “human beings are the subject of its trial”. He feels that a novel “shouldn’t be preachy, or too self-righteous. It should expose us to our own myths, the myths we live by.”

Kannanari is also fascinated by human beings. “I have a healthy cynicism about human nature,” he says, adding: “I believe human beings are helplessly fake.” He also feels that from home to society, if one tends to speak the truth, people tend to reject us. “Human beings have difficulty in coming out fully authentic.”

Rain is an important element in his novel, with its presence felt on every page. When he set out to write it, Kannanari says that it was conceived to be short. “This demanded the weather be interesting; rain was a perfect candidate since it is erratic and dramatic. Heavy rain brings an ominous atmosphere, and also has a certain biblical quality,” he says. The novel, he says, was structurally influenced by As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

Kannanari, who feels that being an Indian mother is the greatest hardship in the world, says that he has read a particular monologue by Addie Bundren, the mother figure in the novel, “hundreds of times”, which reflected in the mother character Nabeesumma in his novel. “I wanted to write about two worlds: mob lynching over an extramarital affair, and an Indian mother,” he explains. “We are all flowers in our mother’s rot.”

akila.k@thehindu.co.in

Published - November 19, 2024 01:43 pm IST